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Policing the Drumcree Demonstrations in Northern Ireland: Testing Leadership Theory in Practice

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Policing the Drumcree Demonstrations in Northern Ireland: Testing Leadership Theory in Practice Policing the Drumcree Demonstrations in Northern Ireland: Testing Leadership Theory In Practice John Benington and Irwin Turbitt Warwick University Business School, UK 1 How this case study came about 1.1 Practising What We Teach and Teaching What We Practice This article is a case study of radical change in the leadership strategy for the policing of the annual Drumcree Sunday demonstrations in Northern Ireland between 2002 and 2004. It is co-authored by an academic and a practitioner who were both involved in different ways in the development and implementation of the alternative strategy. John Benington researches and teaches public leadership and public value on the Warwick MPA degree, a public sector MBA. Irwin Turbitt was at the time a chief superintendent in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and Warwick MPA student from 2000 to 2003. In 2001, Turbitt was given responsibility for the policing of the Drumcree Parades. These take place every July and at the time involved the Protestant unionist Orange Order marching through streets heavily populated by Catholic nationalists, leading to severe clashes. Turbitt decided a new strategy was needed to ease the hostilities and to transform the conflict, which had been extremely violent for over 20 years with the police caught in the middle. Turbitt decided to test an approach based on Mark Moore’s ideas about public value, and Ronald Heifetz’ ideas about adaptive leadership, to which he had been introduced by Benington on the Warwick MPA. He also invited Benington to shadow him, the police and the army during the annual Drumcree Sunday demonstrations in July 2002, July 2003 and July 2004. Benington attended various parts of the preparation and debriefing for the July events, and was given free access to discussions with police and army officials. He was also able to spend time with senior figures in the Protestant Orange Order and the mainly Republican Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition, even visiting some in their homes for confidential discussions. Turbitt and Benington shared a portacabin at the army barracks where the police were billeted for the weekend of the demonstrations. Throughout the day and late into the night, they discussed the events as they unfolded. Turbitt wrote up his experience as a case study of adaptive leadership for his Warwick MPA. He was later promoted to assistant chief constable and seconded to the role of deputy director of the Home Office Police Standards Unit. He has now retired from the police and has become an associate fellow at Warwick Business School, teaching MPA students sitting in the same classroom he sat in when he himself was a student. This leadership case study draws on Turbitt’s first-hand experience as police silver commander for the whole operation, his critical reflection upon theory in the light of this practice, and his 1 subsequent teaching. It combines this with Benington’s participant observation and field notes taken at Drumcree each July over three years. This gives the case study both strengths and weaknesses. First, one of the key actors in the case study, Irwin Turbitt, is contributing to the account and to the discussion from first hand experience, which adds greatly to its texture and immediacy. But inevitably this privileges his particular perspective on events and overshadows alternative perspectives. We have tried to balance this by including other voices, both from the literature and from interviews. Second, the case study is ongoing rather than complete. The Drumcree demonstrations continue each July, and new developments take place every year. This contrasts with many other leadership case studies based upon past events and dead leaders. Third, Turbitt is consciously applying, testing, and adapting particular academic theories. This provides an unusually clear and compelling interpretation of the case, but may inhibit readers from making their own original interpretation. It will be important for readers to pay close attention to the complexities and the paradoxes of the leadership challenge, and of the decision-making situation, rather than generalizing too quickly from theory. Fourth, Benington is by no means an independent or neutral commentator. He leads the Warwick MPA module on leadership, strategy and value, and draws heavily on the work of Heifetz and Moore, both of whom are personal friends as well as academic colleagues. Benington was also one of the supervisors for Turbitt’s MPA dissertation on Drumcree. It is for the reader to decide whether these ‘insider’ views and committed perspectives help or hinder your own analysis and learning from the case. 1.2 Irwin Turbitt’s Story In 2000 I was the head of the Performance Development Unit at National Police Training. While in this post I began the Warwick MPA course. I had long been interested in leadership theory and practice and had been drawn to the course as a result of a conversation with John Benington at an open day at Warwick University in May 2000. I was pleased to find an academic interested in strengthening the relationship between theory and practice. We agreed that the purpose of theory was to improve practice, and that improved practice should help develop better theory. In December 2001 I was appointed commander of the Craigavon District Command Unit (DCU) outside Belfast. Craigavon is one of the busiest DCUs in Northern Ireland. It was designed as a new town in the late 1960s to subsume the two existing towns of Lurgan and Portadown. It is an interesting area to police, with a range of difficult challenges such as drugs, race crime, burglary and alcohol-related crime, as well as specific Northern Ireland issues such as paramilitary activity and, of course, the ‘Drumcree’ demonstrations which take place each July between Protestant unionists and Catholic republicans. However, this would not be my first experience policing Drumcree – I worked there over a number of July weekends since 1986. Following my return to Northern Ireland, I spent the first three months in North Belfast working on the ‘Holy Cross’ school dispute. During this dispute the police mounted a large-scale operation to 2 protect Catholic school children walking along a 285 metre stretch of road – considered Protestant – and through a protest mounted by the residents of that area. Like most disputes in Northern Ireland it had its roots in a long-contested history of bitter sectarianism. Like most such disputes, there was little or no civilized contact between the two sides and the police found themselves in the middle. After nine weeks there was a half-term break and I reviewed our operation from first principles. We devised a four-stage plan for what we called ‘enforced normality’ and I explained this to both sides on the weekend before school recommenced. Essentially, we accepted that neither side was going to behave reasonably, so we would use state force to keep the peace. Somewhat to my surprise within a week the two sides were in face- to-face talks, and the protest ended within three weeks. However, as a police officer I was troubled by our lack of success in prosecuting anyone for the serious offences committed as part of the Holy Cross dispute. I had been a front line officer in such situations for 15 years and knew that it was almost impossible to collect evidence while being attacked by crowds throwing stones, paint and petrol bombs, and potentially shooting bullets. This was on my mind when I got the chance, in early 2002, to think of a new approach to the policing of ‘Drumcree’. The previous year, at another difficult Orange Order parade in Portadown, 68 police officers had been injured and it was made clear to me by my new assistant chief constable boss that a repeat would not be acceptable. It was also clear to the force that the previous approach had not been successful. A change was not only expected but hoped for, and this gave me the chance to try something new. I was studying for my MPA at this time, and it struck me that the requirement to complete a research project provided an opportunity to test Heifetz’s theory of adaptive leadership in the real world. I could use it to steer my planning and commanding of the policing operation for ‘Drumcree Sunday’ in 2002 and 2003. In doing so, I could reflect on my experience in a manner that practitioners seldom have an opportunity to do. So what is adaptive leadership? It emerged in discussions between public managers at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is based on real world cases. In a Fast Company article based on an interview with Ron Heifetz, William Taylor says adaptive leadership requires: a stomach for conflict and uncertainty – among their people and within themselves. This requires an experimental mind-set and an acceptance that some decisions will work and some won’t. It means that some projects will pay off, some won’t. But every decision and every project will provide opportunities to learn something about how the world is changing – and about how your organisation compares with its competition. I was doing the Warwick MPA because I believed in the usefulness of practitioners learning theory and applying it in practice. And I was a public servant because I wanted to create public value. I knew that policing in Craigavon was full of conflict and uncertainty, and I believed Heifetz’s theory offered the chance to create real public value in a very difficult situation. Here was an opportunity to test those beliefs. If the theory had value then it should be possible to apply it and see results. ‘Drumcree’ is far from being resolved.
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